The present invention relates to a new and distinct cultivar of Monarda didyma. The new cultivar will be referred to hereafter by its cultivar name, ‘ACrade’. ‘ACrade’ is a new variety of bee balm suitable for landscape plantings.
The new cultivar of Monarda was a selection from an on going breeding program involving open pollinated and controlled crosses at a research station in Morden, Manitoba, Canada. ‘ACrade’ arose from project in which the inventor planted a cultivated field in an area isolated from other cultivars of Monarda with hundreds of unnamed proprietary seedlings of Monarda didyma, allowed open-pollination to occur, collected the seeds in mass, germinated the seeds, and then lined out the seedlings in 1999. The inventor selected ‘ACrade’ as a single unique plant amongst the resulting seedling from this project in 2001, identified as accession no. 2000-01.
The new cultivar was first asexually propagated by softwood cuttings and rhizome division in Morden, Manitoba, Canada in 2001. Asexual propagation in Morden, Manitoba, Canada and St. Paul, Minn. by these techniques have determined that the characteristics of this cultivar are stable and are reproduced true to type in successive generations.